I ran a test yesterday. I loaded the always-online SimCity—the game that EA says just can't be …
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The code is here. "Simply commenting out Line #22 defeats the force disconnect," says the person who posted it. The removal allows offline play indefinitely.

SimCity's launch week was a scandal because gamers simply couldn't connect what they'd bought to EA servers. It prompted apologies and offers from Electronic Arts and Maxis, the studio that makes the game. This sort of thing had been seen before in launches like Diablo III, and for certain Ubisoft PC games. Gamers resented these lapses as they have always, feeling they had been inconvenienced by a publisher's antipiracy prerogatives.

Bradshaw on Friday offered what she, or Maxis PR, called "straight answers" about the SimCity situation, but plainly avoided the earlier claims that cloud processing—that is, online servers sharing tasks with gamers' computers—was necessary to make SimCity work.

Yes, SimCity has legitimate multiplayer features, through the regional interactions with other players' cities. These were repeatedly cited by Bradshaw on Friday. These features necessarily require some kind of online interaction, and one way to look at a forced timeout is that developers wanted to keep a city from going so far out of synch with its neighbors that, once it reconnected to the server, re-pairing their economies, populations and other features took so much work it broke the game.

Another way to look at it is that Electronic Arts wanted to require SimCity players to stay connected to EA servers at least every 20 minutes, because such a requirement is a surefire way to defeat piracy. And to date, nothing in the game's performance, or in the messaging coming from Maxis or EA has highlighted any gamer benefit equal to or greater than that publishing prerogative.